"Mission
accomplished," declared the Top Gun as he staged the most elaborate photo-
opportunity of his presidency, landing an S-3B Viking aboard the Abraham
Lincoln aircraft carrier. That was six months ago, and little did he know that
the war in Iraq was just beginning. The occupation is a disaster, Americans are
getting killed nearly every day, and President Bush will be lucky if this war
doesn't run him out of office like Vietnam did to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Welcome
to the spin zone. The war is starting to spin out of control, but there's
another issue that could make or break Bush's re-election bid depending on how
it is perceived by American voters: the economy.

The
U.S. economy has lost 2.8 million jobs since February of 2001. Unemployment
stands at 6.1 percent of the labor force, not including the millions who are
working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs, or those who have
given up looking for work.

Despite
fast-growing productivity, real wages have barely grown over the last year.
Soaring health care costs -- including an increasing share shifted to employees
-- have taken a big bite out of most people's income. Millions of older workers
are now slogging past their planned retirement to make up for the savings they
lost in the stock market crash and corporate crime wave.

But
President Bush has made a political career out of setting the bar low enough --
remember the Presidential debates of 2000? -- that anything less than
Great-Depression-style failure could possibly be spun by the Bush team as
success.

And
they are trying, with Treasury Secretary John Snow boasting that the economy
would create 200,000 jobs a month over the next year.

But
the economy needs to create more than 150,000 jobs each month just to employ
new entrants to the labor force and keep the unemployment rate from rising.
Even if Snow's prediction were to come true, the 200,000 jobs per month would
still not make up for the 2.8 million jobs lost since President Bush took
office.

Mr.
Bush is well on his way to being the first president since Herbert Hoover, more
than 70 years ago, to preside over a net loss of jobs.

Some
have argued that the economy is recovering fast enough, but that productivity
-- the amount of output produced per hour of labor -- is growing too much.
According to this argument, since businesses can produce more and more with
fewer labor hours, they're not hiring more employees.

But
this is not true. Productivity always grows more rapidly after a recession, and
this recovery is not much different from the last five -- going back to the
1960s -- in terms of productivity growth. The problem is simply that the
economy has not grown fast enough -- as it did in previous recoveries -- to
create new jobs.

To
be fair, the Bush team is not responsible for the recession that officially
began in March of 2001. That was caused by the collapse of the stock market
bubble, an entirely foreseeable event that all of our political leaders -- and
the press -- should have warned us about. But the Bush team can be blamed for
not doing anything to counteract the downturn.

For
example, they could have provided federal funds to the state governments, which
are reducing employment and economic growth as they try to close an $80 billion
shortfall. But instead they chose to rewrite the tax code in favor of their
very richest contributors, creating chronic fiscal deficits far into the future
-- while providing relatively little economic stimulus at present. And they
embarked on a costly war, based on false pretenses, with no end in sight.

The
economy generally looms large in any Presidential election. Al Gore would most
likely be president today if he had chosen to campaign on the economy, as most
political observers expected he would. After all, his administration had
presided over the longest economic expansion in American history. But for
reasons that remain unexplained, he chose not to make a major issue out of it.

The
Democratic candidate this time is unlikely to make the same mistake. He might
take a page from Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 famously asked voters, "Are
you better off than you were four years ago?" For most Americans, even
those fortunate enough to be employed, the answer next year will probably be
no.

Mark
Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and
Policy Research, a nonpartisan think-tank in the nation's capital (www.cepr.net).
Readers may write him at CEPR, 1621 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite 500, Washington,
DC 20009-1052 and e-mail him at Weisbrot@cepr.net